“Do you mean to say you like me in that way?”

“Yes.”

“That you care about me?”

“Yes.”

“You said you willed me to come out to Constantinople.  Was it for that reason?”

She hesitated.  She had an instinctive understanding of men, but she knew that, in one way, Dion was not an ordinary man; and even if he had been, the catastrophe in his life might well have put him for the time beyond the limits of her experience, wide though they were.

“No,” she said, at last.  “I didn’t like you in that way till I met you in the street, and saw what she had done to you.”

“Then it was only pity?”

“Was it?  I knew your value in England.”

She paused, then added, in an almost light and much more impersonal voice: 

“I think I may say that I’m a connoisseur of values.  And I hate to see a good thing flung away.”

“I’m not a good thing.  Perhaps I might have become one.  I believe I was on the way to becoming worth something.  But now I’m nothing, and I wish to be nothing.”

“I don’t wish you to be anything but what you are.”

“Once you telegraphed to me—­’May Allah have you in His hand.’”

“I remember.”

“It’s turned out differently,” he said, almost with brutality.

“We don’t know that.  You came back.”

“Yes.  I was kept safe for a very good reason.  I had to kill my child.  I’ve accomplished that mission, and now, perhaps, Allah will let me alone.”

She could not see his face or the expression in his eyes clearly, but now she saw his body move sharply.  It twisted to the right and back again.  She put out her hand and took his listlessly, almost as she had taken it in Mrs. Chetwinde’s drawing-room when she had met him for the first time.

“Your hand is like fire,” he whispered.

“Do you think I am ice?” she whispered back, huskily.

“Once I tried to take my hand away from yours.”

“Try to take it away now, if you wish.”

As she spoke she closed her hand tenaciously upon his.  Her little fingers felt almost like steel on his hand, and he thought of the current of the Bosporus which had pulled at his swimming body.

To be taken and swept away!  That at least would be better than drifting, better than death in the form of life, better than slinking in loneliness to watch the doings of others.

“I don’t wish to take it away,” he said.

And with the words mentally he bade an eternal farewell to Rosamund and to all the aspirations of his youth.  From her and from them he turned away to follow the gleam of the torch.  It flickered through the darkness; it wavered; it waited—­for him.  He had tried the life of wisdom, and it had cast him out; perhaps there was a place for him in the unwise life.  He felt spiritually exhausted; but there was within him a physical fever which answered to the fever in the hand which had closed on his.